It is reported that Meta is poaching 4 core researchers from OpenAI, spending money to attract talent and accelerate the AI competition

According to Zhitong Finance APP, Meta (META.US) is investing billions of dollars to gain a leading position in the artificial intelligence race by building the necessary data centers to develop and drive advanced large language models. Now, the company has invested billions more to attract top talent and advanced technology to gain an advantage in the AI battle. Reports indicate that the American tech giant Meta has poached four artificial intelligence researchers from OpenAI.

The four researchers poached by Meta are recognized technical backbones within OpenAI, including Jiahui Yu, the leader of the o3, o4-mini, and GPT-4.1 projects; Hongyu Ren, the creator of the o3-mini and o1-mini models; Shuchao Bi, the head of the multimodal model post-training team; and Shengjia Zhao, a key contributor to GPT-4 and the o1 project.

Previously, according to reports on Wednesday, in its latest talent acquisition effort, Meta had already hired Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, all of whom previously worked at OpenAI's Zurich office. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised company employees up to $100 million in compensation to entice them to join its AI projects.

Meanwhile, reports indicate that Meta is in negotiations with Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to bring them into its planned superintelligence lab. It is reported that Zuckerberg initially intended to acquire the entire Safe Superintelligence company but was rejected by co-founder Ilya Sutskever.

These moves come after Meta invested $14.3 billion in the AI startup Scale AI and hired its CEO and co-founder Alexandr Wang. Moreover, Meta had also intended to acquire Perplexity AI but failed to reach an agreement on the deal.

Mike Proulx, an analyst at Forrester Research, stated, "Meta is doing this because they want to win in the AI race, plain and simple. Right now, AI is everything."

All of these developments are due to Meta's decision to postpone the initial release of its Llama 4 Behemoth AI model. Reports indicate that the company will delay the launch of the model until late this fall due to concerns that it does not represent a significant enough upgrade compared to previous versions.

Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, stated, "I think this has two main implications: the first is that it indicates Meta is facing difficulties; the second is that it also shows Zuckerberg is not satisfied with this." For Meta, the goal is very clear: to attract as many fresh talents as possible to drive the development of its artificial intelligence projects and to gain a leading position in the AI competition.

Meta's Initiatives in the Field of Artificial Intelligence

Meta's efforts to dominate the field of artificial intelligence differ from its main competitors (such as OpenAI, Google, xAI, etc.). The company has not closed its AI models but instead offers them as open-source software for developers and businesses to use independently.

Meta has set certain restrictions on how users can utilize its models. For example, the company requires that if the monthly active user count of its products exceeds 700 million, the relevant businesses must request permission from Meta.

Regardless, Meta's ultimate goal is to allow as many users as possible to use and develop its products through its AI models. So why doesn't Meta charge everyone who wants to use its software? Because every time a company modifies its model, Meta can gain valuable data from it, which can help improve these models in the future.

Meta is also not very interested in selling the usage rights of its models. The company primarily uses its AI technology to support its advertising and content recommendation services, rather than selling its AI services as part of its office software packages like Microsoft (MSFT.US).

Susan Li, Meta's Chief Financial Officer, stated during the company's recent earnings call with investors that since introducing the Llama algorithm into the recommendation system at the end of last year, the user engagement time for the Threads app has increased by 4%.

Meta also relies on its AI models to provide intelligent support for its hardware products, including its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and other future devices based on AI technology.

Proulx explained, "Meta is taking these actions because they have a lot of money, and with this money, even if they cannot develop on their own, they can use it to acquire the talents and capabilities they need... thus surpassing their competitors."

However, Meta is not the only company eyeing the new AI players in Silicon Valley. Reports indicate that Apple (AAPL.US) is also considering acquiring its own AI company, as the iPhone manufacturer seeks to enhance its position in the field of artificial intelligence.

Apple originally planned to launch an AI-driven version of Siri at the beginning of this year, but due to difficulties in its own development, it has postponed the release to the second half of this year. To this end, reports suggest that Apple has also considered acquiring Perplexity AI. Reportedly, Apple's competitor Samsung is also planning to apply Perplexity technology to its products A spokesperson for Perplexity stated that the company is currently unaware of any ongoing or future merger and acquisition matters. However, they added, "The best original equipment manufacturers in the world want to provide users with the best search services and the most accurate artificial intelligence technology, and that is the advantage that Perplexity possesses."

For Meta, it all depends on whether it can attract the right talent from top artificial intelligence companies to join its AI projects and position the company at the forefront of the AI race. If it fails to do so, this social media giant may find itself falling further behind with no clear direction forward